Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

Edge of Tomorrow is literally Groundhog Day with space aliens; more accurately, it’s Groundhog Day meets Aliens, right down to the inclusion of Bill Paxton and a kickass female lead in a robotic suit.  It’s a fine popcorn film, engaging without any real dead spots and bankable in the best Tom Cruise tradition.

Cruise stars as Major Bill Cage, a military spokesman who is shanghaied into service on the front lines of a conflict between humanity and the invading “Mimic” aliens.  His first day of combat goes disastrously, but his newfound ability to “reset the day” and travel back in time brings him to legendary soldier Rita Vrtaski (Emily Blunt), who trains him to become a better fighter and take advantage of his time traveling powers to end the war.

Regardless of what one makes of Tom Cruise personally, the man is one of Hollywood’s more reliable action heroes.  His recent work has been consistently entertaining, due in large part to his charismatic on-screen personality.  Here that quintessential Cruise persona gets inverted a bit; when we first meet Cage, he is essentially a deserter, more at home selling a war than fighting it.  Cruise plays these early scenes very well, and he does a comparably good job with Cage’s transformation into a battle-hardened soldier.

In some ways, though, he’s still playing a version of Tom Cruise.  Don’t get me wrong – I very much like that character (he was plenty of fun in the underrated Jack Reacher), but it’s not really news.  What Edge of Tomorrow does give us that we haven’t seen a dozen times before is the commanding performance of Emily Blunt as the “Angel of Verdun.”  It’s a performance that does recall Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, especially with the mechanical exoskeleton iconography.  It’s not, however, a metaphor for her own resilience as was the case in Aliens; instead, Blunt humanizes Rita and saves her from the worst fate of all – the stereotypical romantic subplot.  And honestly, thank God – where Groundhog Day relegated Andie MacDowell (also playing a Rita – coincidence?) to the object of Bill Murray’s desire, Edge of Tomorrow flips that and gives us a hard-as-nails woman who is uninterested in Cruise’s amorous affection for her.  It helps that she’s incredibly immersed in the role, which could make its own successful feature in and of itself.

The film is surprisingly funny, which will definitely bring up those Groundhog Day vibes, and it’s to director Doug Liman’s credit that the film never feels uneven in that regard.  What holds it back from being a truly great film and restricts it to the province of popcorn blockbuster is that a lot of the film does feel somewhat undercooked.  We have two very compelling protagonists, but the villains are a bit underdeveloped; aside from a neat and original look, they’re really only there to fill the antagonist quota.  We don’t know what they want or why they’re on earth, which wouldn’t be too bad except for the fact that the film reminds us a few times that these questions are lingering.

Similarly, the members of J Squad (the military troop into which Cruise is drafted) aren’t very well crafted, functioning mostly as bodies when in combat and comic relief when not.  There’s value in comedy in the midst of a war film – see above for the unexpected humor in the film – but there are a few jokes that don’t feel earned and especially a few deaths in the supporting cast that never quite resonate because a) you’ve seen them die plenty of times before in rejected timelines, and b) you have to remind yourself, “Okay, they said he died, but which one was he again?”

All of this is not to say that Edge of Tomorrow is a bad film.  It’s at worst serviceable and at best a fun and entertaining flick that does enough things right to justify its own existence.  If I had to do it over again, I would.

Edge of Tomorrow is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, language and brief suggestive material.”  There are a lot of military combat sequences between armored humans and tentacled alien monsters, though they’re closer to the frenetic shaky-cam of video games than the brutal gore of Saving Private Ryan.  We see one bare bottom, Tom Cruise gets a rather funny three-quarters of an F-bomb, and a suggestive pick-up line (more of a shrug, really) is quickly and mercifully defused.

Check back on Thursday when The Cinema King assesses The Fault in Our Stars!